I focused my career on building businesses that live at the intersection of media, entertainment and new technologies. I was in the cable industry early on and founded companies that launched new platforms for cable advertising and marketing. After that - before "interactive" was a buzzword - I ran the interactive music channel Video Jukebox Network (The Box) and sold it to MTV. In the 2000s I built MediaNet, the first company to aggregate and distribute digital music and media on a mass scale. Most important, I was among the first to equip my road bike with electronic shifting. Now I am a Managing Director of DEV (Digital Entertainment Ventures) where our mission is to fuel the companies that transform media and entertainment. And I still hope that one day I will be recruited as a domestique for an American team in the Tour de France.

Angel Fund Members Make a Personal Investment in a Community Ravaged by Sandy

About a dozen of us were wielding sledgehammers and shovels at the Little League field next to Last Chance Pond Park in Staten Island. The park was aptly named. On October 31 the water was so high that a full size refrigerator floated in from three blocks away and eventually settled in the middle of the infield when the water receded several days later. The interiors of the snack bar, storage building and dugouts were all ruined and the baseball equipment was hopelessly waterlogged. Our job was to gut the buildings and collect and pile all the refuse so that it could be carted away.

We were members of the ARC Angel Fund, a New York based group that invests in seed and early stage high-growth businesses. One of our members, Jeff Finkle, had circulated an email a week earlier talking about how moved he was by the impact Sandy was having on people’s lives and proposed we do something about it. This led us to Sandy Baggers, a group that was started in the immediate aftermath of the storm in an apartment in Brooklyn by four tech entrepreneurs. Divya Kapasi, one of the founders, said, “Our mission is a grassroots movement that helps Doers Do. We mobilize like-minded citizens for relief and recovery efforts post-Sandy.”

Our team worked hand in hand with community members from Little League coaches to parents of players, tearing down shelves, tossing boxes of moldy jerseys and stripping buildings down to their frames. It is striking how quickly a group of strangers can mesh when they are united by a common purpose. In three hours we produced a debris pile four feet high and 50 feet long that was systematically loaded on to a garbage truck by an agile little bulldozer. But this was just a warm up. We were about to move to a location where the destruction was more profound; full neighborhoods of drowned homes.

A school bus drove us across town to the scene of the greatest flooding where volunteers at a makeshift staging area handed out tools and dispatched crews to homeowners in need. We were given an address on Patterson Avenue and headed off to find it. As we walked, the scale of the storm’s destruction began to register. Every house had an emergency advisory posted on the front door and most were abandoned. We looked down a side street and saw a pile of refuse in a grassy lot that was easily three stories high. A section of road had collapsed and a car, finish dulled from being underwater for days, was perched nose down into the hole. A handwritten sign nailed to a telephone pole read, “Mr. Prez, Help S.I.”

A wiry young guy with dark hair and a short beard greeted us in front of his home. He exuded a sort of manic energy that was no doubt a reaction to weeks of homeless life while he stripped down what was left of his one story bungalow. Inside, the floor was just a frame with a crawl space below it that was filled with rusted bed frames, springs, window sills and personal items. We set up a relay with two people in the crawl space, one at a side door, and two in an alley to feed these items out to the curb for collection by roving trucks. We quickly finished the task and moved on to three identical cottages adjacent to the wiry guy’s home.

A mild mannered old man named Mike told us that the kitchen in his cottage had to be knocked down and removed. This was the moment my son, Chris, had been waiting for. The sledgehammer was beckoning. We took turns throwing our weight into huge roundhouse swings that sent cabinets flying and multicolored ceramic counters crashing to the floor. Other members of our group dragged ruined appliances out onto the street and crawled across the floors stripping floor tiles from the wood. Eventually we all began to run out of steam as the sun dropped in the sky and the building interiors darkened.

We had seen firsthand that there is still much work to be done in Staten Island and throughout the New York area. Volunteer organizations such as Sandy Baggers are doing impressive work and need our continued support. You can find out more about Sandy Baggers at http://www.facebook.com/SandyBaggers.

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